Hobbit Rock

Tolkien hit hard. There’s no other way to explain it. Within six months I had been transformed from a mediocre but service-able pulling guard to someone named Faldorn, rolling dice on a ping-pong table and agonizing over whether I should play as a Mage or a Druid. So you can perhaps understand why Bo Hansson’s Lord of the Rings would be considered essential listening. In 1972, Bo released the most eagerly anticipated album of the year to a small cadre of priests, wizards and warriors who were working on accumulating spell and experience points. It wasn’t his fault. This was decades before Peter Jackson’s movies. It was years before Ralph Bakshi’s cartoon. And Hansson was a Swedish keyboard player who had reportedly jammed with Jimi Hendrix and who loved elves and dwarves. Rumor had it that he’d recorded his Tolkien tribute while holed up in a rented castle on the Scottish moors, and that the Moog synthesizer was prominently featured. My friends and I took an oath that we would listen to it together. The plan was to strike camp in my basement the night of the album’s release. I was to leave the Holiday Inn, ditch my busboy uniform, head to the mall, purchase the album and return home before evensong. The rest of the fellowship was due to arrive after the evening repast. At 7:30 they showed up at the front door, some in chain mail. “Good to see ye, lad” said Oy, giving me a hearty embrace. “Undü ar alpelinör,” Elwing said, nodding to my parents. My father glowered over the top of his newspaper. My mother pulled me aside and expressed concern about Arghelm, who had taken to wearing a cape. “He’s not carrying a sword or anything?” she asked. “No, mom,” I told her, “nobody takes it that seriously.” I went downstairs to find Arghelm polishing what appeared to be a scimitar. “Put that thing away,” I told him. “What the hell are you doing?” “Stay in character, Faldorn!” he commanded me. Frankly, it was hard to envision the noble Arghelm sprawled out in front of stereo speakers, but I didn’t really want to challenge the fantasy/ reality distinctions right then. “Just put it away, okay,” I told him. “We’re safe from danger tonight.” And so, after swearing oaths of loyalty, we settled down to listen to Lord of the Rings. We weren’t sure what to make of it. The spacey prog rock we heard on “At the House of Elrond” might have been meant to conjure up visions of elves. Or the Starship Enterprise. It was hard to tell. The track called “The Black Riders” sounded like a bossa nova, something none of us had really considered from a Tolkienesque point of view. “The Horns of Rohan” sounded vaguely like the theme from Mission: Impossible. “It really is a lot like Lothlorien,” said Elwing. “It’s terrible and worshipful, much like the Lady Galadriel.” His voice quavered a bit, for he had sworn fealty to the Lady. Even then I think we suspected there was something deeply wrong with Elwing. The rest of us weren’t fully convinced. “It’s a little jazzy, isn’t it?” Arghelm said, not so much asking a question as issuing a royal decree. “I can’t say I was really expecting Miles Davis in Middle Earth.” “It sucks,” Oy offered. “Hippies with too much pipeweed.” And so there passed from our midst the album known as Lord of the Rings. Bo had blown it. He had proven himself to be more in tune with the 1960s than the 1360s. It’s unclear now what we had expected. Perhaps more lutes. But it was likely that no album could have possibly matched the grandeur of the soundtracks we heard playing in our heads. It would take Peter Jackson and Howard Shore to do that. Shortly after our Lord of the Rings listening party, I was smitten with the fair Claire, who was a real girl who liked Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, and who probably would’ve slapped me if I’d called her “my lady.” Fantasy wasn’t doing much for me anymore. A week after meeting Claire, I regained my sanity and broke from the fellowship, from which I’m told there later issued a series of dire threats and outraged proclamations.